Interaction with objects in the world around us is a richly multisensory experience. Casting a pebble into a pond, we both see the ripples resulting from the disturbance of the water's surface and hear the impact of the stone on the water as a disturbance of the air. If we are close enough and the stone is big enough, we might also get wet. Furthermore, the interaction of stone and water makes certain information explicit: the size of the splash is correlated with both the size of the stone and the force with which it was thrown, and the sound it makes provides information about the depth of the water. Thus the physical laws that govern the behavior of stones falling into water give rise to an event which is perceived via many sensory channels which each encode, in their different ways the complexity of the event. The perceptual system therefore has a number of representations of the event upon which to draw.
In the detailed description that follows, we describe a methodology for sound control based on the commonalities between the behavior of physical objects and that of sound objects which share many of their physical properties, and describe three exemplary embodiments of this methodology.
In the course of the description that follows, selected publications will be cited using the notation {Ref. nn} where “nn” refers to the numbered citation in the list of references which appears below.